My poor mother. She had such great expectations when she found herself knocked up with her third child. I was supposed to be a boy. I thank my lucky stars ultrasounds didn't exist back then (you know..back when dinosaurs roamed the earth) otherwise I'm sure she would have just flushed the embryo that would be me down the toilet. I was the third daughter. According to my mother I came out screaming the house down and was, in her words - "this pink bundle covered in white down just like a little pig". Pig huh...some things never change obviously.
Anyfatpig....she used to tell me that when the nurse put me in her arms... my arms were flailing and I had my face scrunched up like I had just sucked on something sour (huh a look I still have to this day). Apparently when I opened my eyes my mother almost dropped me, for I had blue eyes. Both my siblings had been born with brown...almost black eyes, like my mother. My eyes were blue,clear, ice blue, just like my father's. My mother would often tell me when I was a teenager, and doing something I wasn't supposed to be doing, "I knew you would be a problem child the minute I saw those blue eyes". Yeah well, love you too Mum!
Problem child, me? Well I guess that would depend upon what your definition of problem is. If problem means getting picked up by the police when you're thirteen years old for being drunk and disorderly in a public place, well than yeah...I guess I could have been labelled as such. I swear my friends made me consume the half quart of Kelly's Wine I drank that night. They than proceeded to leave me passing out, in front of the youth centre we had been hanging out at. The person who owned the lawn which I was napping on called the cops. The cops apparently frown on young teenage girls sleeping on lawns. Who knew?
Mother's also frown on being called at 10:00 at night to come and pick up their teenage daughters at the police station. This I know for 100% certainty. My mother did not drive. So not only did she have to schlepp her ass down to the police station to pick up her 13 year old daughter, she had to phone one of her girlfriends to pick her up, so she could pick me up. My poor mother. Mother's also frown on being told, by said teenage girl, that she's going to hang out at a friend's house, when said problem child is actually getting drunk with her no good friends. I do remember my mother's fury. Holy fuck she was mad. I have never in all my life seen my mother that angry. She couldn't even look at me (or perhaps it was the puke all over my clothes that caused her disdain) when she came to pick me up. She took me home and almost threw me in my bedroom. Warned me that if I puked in the bed I was cleaning it up my damn self and that come the next morning, I would be a very very sorry girl indeed. My poor mother.
I wish I could go back in time. I would give myself an ass whooping that I would not soon forget. I was horrible. That part of your brain that says, "Perhaps this isn't such a great idea" did not exist when I was a teenager. I had no fear, no sense of decorum, no inhabition. I was game for anything. Stay out all night when you're 15 years old with your 21 year old boyfriend, who by the way, thought you were 18...check. Lie to your mother on a daily ...christ hourly...basis. Check. Fist fight with your younger brother until one of you bleeds. Check. Throw your older sister into the dresser because she wore your favorite top and ruined it. Check. Throw a party when your mother is working the night shift, get high on acid and decide to take the cat for a walk..in your nightgown..at midnight. Banner idea. Check. Fall down a flight of basement stairs (drunk), break your ankle, lie to the ER doc about how much alcohol you'd consumed, and THEN phone your Mum the next morning to come to the hospital to sign papers so that you could have surgery on your ankle...because it was broken in three places and required two plates and a shitload of screws to put it back together again. Mum thought my 17 year old juvenile deliquent ass was babysitting for the weekend. Check!
I swear, I did not grow up in a trailer park. My mother had all her teeth. We did not have multiple disassembled cars in our front yard.
I get physically ill when I think that my daughter might be anything like I was. Physically ill. The big difference though between me and my mother. My mother kept giving me "chances". For some reason I was able to convince her EACH and EVERY time that it would be the last time I'd get in trouble. I think she was just so fucking tired of dealing with me that she didn't have the energy to fight with me. Also, keep in mind I grew up in the 80's. Parents were not the parents of today. I hitchiked to school, with my mother's blessing. Parents did not call their child 12 times an evening on their cell phones. We would head out the door, promising to be home by curfew, knowing full well half the time there was no chance in hell curfew would be made, and that's where our parents control would end. Oh she would ground me, she would kick my arse (literally), she would lock me in my room, she would take my allowance away. None of it had any type of lasting affect. With me as a mother, it would happen once, and only once and than I'd just break her legs so she couldn't walk. Kidding...kind of.
Do I regret doing this stuff? Honestly? I do and I don't. I regret putting my mother through that. I have no doubt the stress and worry of dealing with me took years off her life. She never gave up on me. She would have been totally within her right to throw my ass out of the house, but she didn't. She let me push, and push and push at the boundries, until the boundries were left in a cloud of dust. She loved me through it all.
But holy shit I had fun. The beach parties, the friends, the laughs. We were always laughing (and no it wasn't the acid...that only happened once). I have memories of camping trips with friends, sitting around the fire telling stories and laughing until we hurt. I fell in and out of love on a regular basis. It was during one of these parties that I met my best friend. Twenty two years later and we still have each other's back. No one ever got hurt , ok yeah, the whole plate and pins in the ankle thing ...yeah ok you got me there. But it really did make me a stronger person. All of it.
Then on my 18th birthday I told my mother, over the phone (because I was so damned scared) that I was pregnant. That's a story for another day.
OMG, we could have been twins. And now, I pray daily that my daughter won't do 1/3 the things that I did. Pay backs are a bitch. And I am very scared! Gotta love our moms though.